The Month in Techno

I love my editors at Pitchfork for giving me a monthly opportunity to wax ecstatic about all forms of four-to-the-floor music, but I'll never forgive them for titling the column "The Month in Techno"-- what an albatross that header is, leaving me feeling obligated to provide some grand, totalizing view of the past 30 days. Of course that's impossible; the month in techno looks very different if you're in Detroit, New York, Berlin, Ljubljana or-- in my case-- Barcelona. Even here, the month in techno was a wealth of contradictions that included Michael Mayer's lugubrious, round-cornered wallop; Alex Under's breezy, piano-heavy minimal house; Lawrence's acid Romanticism; M.A.N.D.Y. and Tiefschwarz taking genre du jour electro-house into dark, ravy corners; and a host of headliners (Donnacha Costello, Misc., Dominik Eulberg) that I never made it out to hear. Aside from the 4/4 pulse and the shared imperative to rave, they're all fairly different sounds, and all indicative of various contemporary offshoots of techno's basic template. So how to sum it all up?

Well, for one thing, techno is getting weirder. Ok, so full-on experimental freakouts are few and far between-- this is "dance music," after all, with an emphasis on functionalism-- but woozy rhythms, psychedelic detailing, and discombobulating effects are permeating track after track, leaving clubbers' heads spinning like a Leslie. It's not insignificant that for such a subgenre-happy medium, no one's really figured out what to call the various new strains of t____o. The term currently in vogue, electro-house, is generic enough to be basically meaningless; here in Spain they simply call everything "minimal," but listen to one of Mayer's bouncing, pop-infused sets and try telling me with a straight face that all that ballooning bombast is minimal. The Optimo folks say "whorehouse," which is cheeky, but hardly descriptive. My favorite term is one that's being bandied about on ILM: "ketamine house." No doubt the term's origins lie partially in the fact that the drug is enjoying growing popularity in Berlin and London, but the substance's alleged dissociative effects-- the infamous "K-hole," where space and time collapse-- certainly make for a compelling analogy to the music at hand.

As a starting point, take Steve Barnes' goggle-eyed "Cosmic Sandwich", released a year ago as a one-sided platter on Traum sublabel My Best Friend. Despite its relatively grounded disco beat, everything else is continually drifting heavenward-- the curlicuing keys, the spray-clouds of static, the freakily effected voices. There are no marked chord changes, only knots in its repetitions. Don't underestimate its length, either: Clocking in at almost 11 minutes, it could be twice as long, and probably would be was there room on the vinyl. More and more singles are coming out with sidelong tracks pressed at 33, to cram in as much as possible. (It can't possibly be accidental that Ricardo Villalobos' Monobox remix simply cuts off in mid-beat; my guess is that the track didn't fit on a single side of vinyl, and rather than editing, he decided to let it run as far as the grooves would let it.)

It's appropriate that Dominik Eulberg opens disc two of his excellent new mix CD doublepack, Kreucht & Fleucht, with his own mix of "Cosmic Sandwich", because K&F probably offers the most complete picture of ketamine house to date. (Note: nowhere does my use of the term imply an allegation of drug use on the part of the artist, nor an endorsement of the drug! In fact, we probably need a better name right away. Psychedelic house? Woozehouse? Mindmelt? The best suggestion wins immortality in print, via my next column.) The 27-cut tracklist is a virtual who's-who of woozy house producers, including Robag Wrume and the Wighnomy Brothers (who alone rack up four credits), James Holden, Nathan Fake, Chaton + Hopen, Barnes, Trentemøller, Luciano, and of course Eulberg himself. And while a number of the cuts are, at root, fairly traditional minimal techno, it's the detailing that sets them apart. If Ricardo Villalobos' Alcachofa was the first indication that minimal techno and microhouse were going psychedelic (and last year's understated, otherworldly Thè Au Harem D'Archimède showed how far such brain-warping textures could be taken in a nominally techno context), Kreucht & Fleucht represents their epitome in a club context. Behind every boom-clack beat there's an undercurrent of unease. Clicks and gurgles flit from extreme right to extreme left. Unintelligible voices bubble up from the mix. Melodies go epic-- and then, as though that grand, ocean-crossing arc weren't dramatic enough-- remix themselves into great billowing sails powered by gale-force arpeggios. And acid, techno's virtual cornerstone, newly sandblasted and shined up for its 2005 appreciation, returns sounding more warped than ever.

Sure, disco's hot, thanks in part to Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas, by-the-numbers acid is everywhere, and Kompakt's alternative trance slam-bang is selling gangbusters, but check out any recent mix CD-- from DJs as diverse as Slam, Ivan Smagghe, Adam Beyer, and even Sasha-- and you'll see that ketamine house is increasingly gaining strength across techno's many scenes, from the minimalists to the progressives. In a future column I'll map out the component parts of this groggy, as yet unnamed genre. Until then, follow the hard-panned gurgles and endlessly spiraling delay-- and just say (tech)no.